Cancer is a cell mass composed of undifferentiated cells that ignore necessary conditions in tissue and undergo unlimited proliferation unlike normal cells that are capable of performing regular and temperate proliferation and inhibition according to the individual's needs, and is also called tumor. Cancer cells with the unlimited proliferation penetrate into surrounding tissue, and in more serious cases, the cancer cells involve metastasis to other organs of the body, accompanied by severe pain, which results in an incurable disease eventually causing death.
The American Cancer Society reported that there are 12 million patients or more newly diagnosed with cancer globally in 2007, with 7.6 million deaths, and about 20,000 deaths every day from cancer. In Korea, National Statistical Office reported in 2006 that the leading cause of death was from cancer. Accordingly, development of a tumor treatment agent having excellent therapeutic effect is urgently required to reduce mental and physical pain caused by cancer development and disease, and to improve the quality of life.
Despite many efforts, a mechanism in which normal cells are transformed into cancer cells has not been correctly identified. However, external factors such as environmental factors, chemical substances, radiation, viruses, etc., and internal factors such as genetic and immunological factors, etc., are complexly entangled, resulting in cancer. Genes involved in the development of cancer include oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes, and cancer occurs when balance between the oncogenes and the tumor suppressor genes are collapsed by external factors or internal factors as described above.
Cancer is largely classified into blood cancer and solid cancer, and occurs in almost all parts of the body such as lung cancer, stomach cancer, breast cancer, oral cancer, liver cancer, uterine cancer, esophageal cancer, skin cancer, etc. As treatment methods thereof, a small number of target therapeutic agents such as Gleevec or Herceptin have been used for treatment of specific cancers. However, surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy that inhibits cell proliferation have been main anticancer treatment methods until now. However, since these main methods are not target therapeutic agents, the biggest problems of conventional chemotherapy are cytotoxic side effects and drug resistance, which are main factors that eventually result in failure of the treatment despite successful initial response by a chemotherapeutic agent. Therefore, in order to overcome the limitations of these chemotherapeutic agents, it is necessary to continuously develop a target therapeutic agent with clear anticancer mechanism.
Accordingly, many studies on specific molecular biologic factors involved in tumorigenesis for developing the target therapeutic agent have been conducted, and in particular, molecular biological factors are variously used to predict prognosis of cancer, or to determine performance of chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
Gleevec is one of the representative drugs that most inhibit a tyrosine kinase receptor, one of the specific molecular biological factors. Gleevec has an anticancer effect by inhibiting an action of the Bcr-Abl fusion gene formed by chromosome translocation in the Philadelphia chromosome observed in chronic myelogenous leukemia, and has achieved satisfactory results in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia, as a tyrosine kinase inhibitor. Then, the drugs that have anticancer effects as the tyrosine kinase inhibitors, include gefitinib and erlotinib that are epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitors used as non-small cell lung cancer therapeutic agents, and sorafenib and sunitinib used as kidney cell carcinoma therapeutic agents. However, these drugs are known to have side effects such as hemorrhaging, heart attack, heart failure, liver failure, etc.
Recently, anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) has been found in many human tumors and has been studied as a target of target treatment.
The carcinogenic process of the ALK is known to be a fusion gene of ALK-NPM (nucleophosmin), which is mainly observed in anaplastic large cell lymphoma. When the ALK is activated by gene fusion, tyrosine kinase in the ALK acts abnormally and causes cancer. Specifically, the abnormally activated ALK induces cell proliferation, and interferes with apoptosis, thereby preventing cell death, and rearranges cell skeletons, and modifies cell morphology. Cancer geneticization of the ALK is made by interaction with a downstream molecule which is a target material of the ALK, wherein the downstream molecule is a material that mediates intracellular signaling. The ALK is linked to other tyrosine kinases that are normal or are subjected to cancer geneticization to induce interaction or to activate a variety of other pathways.
In particular, the ALK gene is fused with EML4 (echinoderm microtubule-associated protein-like 4) gene in lung cancer cell to produce active tyrosine kinase (EML4-ALK), wherein it has been known that a cancerous ability of the EML4-ALK is dependent on enzyme activity, and further, Mosse et al., have reported about 26% of the ALK gene amplification in 491 neuroblastoma specimens. In addition, the ALK gene has been found to be expressed in a number of non-hematopoietic cell tumors such as large B-cell lymphoma, systemic histiocytosis, inflammatory myoblastic sarcoma, esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, non-small cell lung cancer, rhabdomyosarcoma, myoblastoma, breast cancer, and melanoma cell lines. Various kinds of the ALK fusion proteins have been commonly found in an inflammatory bone marrow fibroblastoma tumor which is a rare disease, and thus, these fusion proteins are thought to be deeply involved in the development of tumors.
Thus, a therapeutic agent targeting the ALK-NPM that aims the treatment of cancer has been developed by blocking an activation pathway of the ALK. Recently, Crizotinib (PF-02341066), one of the small molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitor which was developed as a selective inhibitor of tumorigenic mutation by Pfizer, is known to be effective in the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer as ATP-competent c-Met/HGFR and the ALK inhibitor, and was approved by the FDA in 2011 as a new drug.
Further, NVP-TAE684, LDK-378 from Novartis, and CH5424802 from Chugai are known to have an effect of reducing a tumor size in neuroblastoma cell lines in addition to anaplastic large cell lymphoma cell lines.
Patent Document 1 developed a therapeutic candidate material having various skeletons has been developed for the purpose of inhibiting an activity of conventional ALK, and disclosed that a pyrimidine derivative selectively inhibits the ALK, which is capable of being developed as an anticancer agent.
Therefore, the present inventors have made efforts to develop a compound exhibiting the effect of inhibiting an ALK activity, and found that a pyrimidine-2,4-diamine derivative having a specific structure had a remarkably excellent effect of inhibiting the ALK activity to be useful as an agent for preventing or treating cancer, and as a result, completed the present invention.